Usually I don’t even pick up calls with no caller id. At least it
wasn’t a RoboDialer (now called, as I recently learned, “agent-less
proactive contact”).
The call was, most likely, in response to my recent InfoWorld article, “10 sure-fire ways to kill telecommuting.” Everyone’s a critic. Not everyone is so succinct.
When InfoWorld asked me to write about telecommuting, my knowledge was superficial at best, so I asked KJR’s subscribers to share their experience and insights. 350 replies later I’m officially an expert.
Starting with a realization many discussions don’t make clear, which
is that telecommuters come in five distinct flavors (I doubt this is
original, although I couldn’t find anything like this breakdown when
researching the subject). They are:
-
Ad hoc or casual telecommuters: Employees
who work from home when special circumstances call for it, like when
their pet iguana needs veterinary attention, they need to focus on a
single task without distractions, or their spouse is called out of town
and someone needs to watch the children.
-
Virtual enterprise workforce: Employees
who work in a company that has no physical location -- a company
designed from the start to be staffed by employees whose primary
contact is through telepresence, and who meet each other face-to-face
only rarely, or not at all.
These five work styles have more differences than similarities and
very different dynamics, which is why most generalizations about
telecommuting fail.
The generalization that doesn't fail:
Telecommuting of any kind makes good employees and managers better and makes weak employees and managers worse.
As Mike Carpenter, EVP and Founder of Sooth, Inc. puts it, “It
exposes bad management instantly. If someone is a micro-manager who
likes to pop up and interrupt people, who doesn’t assign appropriate
work and authority, that manager will not be able to hide that fact any
longer.”
Dave Simon, IT Director at the Sierra Club sees even more to it. He
regards telecommuting management as being different and more difficult
than having face-time with staff. As he put it, “A manager needs to be
more attentive and disciplined in all facets of managing a remote work
group or telecommuter.”
Managers and employees agreed that good employees can become even
more productive from a home office. Some thought working from home made
bad managers and employees worse.
Others considered the tradeoffs more balanced, such as the
telecommuter who said, “You can blow off the day just as easily at work
as you can at home,” and the manager who pointed out, “Being in control
and feeling like you are in control are two different things.”
Relationships? Who needs relationships?
Loss of managerial control is a minor inconvenience compared with
another challenge managers face when dealing with a remote workforce:
It’s easy for everyone involved to act as though employees are
contractors -- hired help, not a permanent part of the team.
With no office to go to, no co-workers to schmooze with, and most
contact through the keyboard and screen, many remote workers said that
while they liked working from home, they felt detached from their
employer and teams, and the feeling increased as time went on.
One anonymous correspondent put it this way: “The single biggest
challenge is that, as time goes by, a certain staleness sets in -- the
relationships deteriorate, organizations change, and people can get
lost in the shuffle.”
Another -- an Operations Support Technician -- added, “In two years of
telecommuting I’ve observed my influence amongst colleagues fade.”
The feeling can become extreme. Dean Baird complained that he never
heard about job openings until long after his in-office brethren,
Conrad Macina questioned whether, “…a telecommuter ever gets the same
crack at raises and promotions as someone who’s visible every day.”
No-longer-a-telecommuter Carl Hafner was succinct in his assessment: “I
literally became a non-person.”
The worst consequence of working from home, though? As former-remote-worker Larry Cadloff explained,
telecommuting “… takes all the fun out of pilfering office supplies.”
These lamentable outcomes aren’t, it turns out, inevitable. How
to avoid them will have to wait until next week’s column, though,
because this one is out of space.
